What You Should Know About Sustainable Aviation and the Impact of Flying.
As someone who loves to travel – not just as a source of newness and inspiration, but as a way to experience deep cultural exchange and tell meaningful stories around it – I feel utterly conflicted.
This love for the road, immersing in different ways of life around the world, seeking community and conservation initiatives, and writing about sustainable travel comes at a cost – ironically to the very planet I love and feel driven to protect. This passion, which also feels like my purpose, is often fueled by flying, which accounts for atleast 2.5% of global carbon emissions.
Struck by flight guilt, I’ve embarked on adventurous land journeys to reduce my flying footprint. I’ve travelled using only public transport from Thailand to India via Myanmar, through the length of Iran to Armenia, and crossed many land borders across Central Asia, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
Also read: Do we Need to Reconsider Our Flying Guilt?
But when I joined the tourism industry to sign Tourism Declares and devised my climate action plan as a travel writer, I was horrified to measure my flying footprint. In 2022, I took 32 flights, emitting a whopping 19.25 tons of CO2e. In 2023, I cut back flying alongside work and leisure travel drastically, reducing my footprint (and mental well-being ;-)) by ~70%. But in 2024, I had to fly halfway around the world to finish my Master’s in Boston. I made a trip of it and spent three months slow travelling in Peru, highlighting stories of community tourism initiatives from the Andean Highlands to the Amazon and Lake Titicaca. Now in 2025, I continue to club travel assignments and slow travel.
Case in point: Sustainable air travel – or the lack of it – feels personal. I *need* the aviation sector to do better, so I can pursue meaningful travel without feeling guilty about flying.
Last month, I got invited to the Airbus Summit 2025 in Toulouse, France – focused on sustainable aviation and innovative flying technologies. It gave me the chance to deepen my understanding of where we are with respect to sustainable aviation, where we need to be, and what it’ll take to get us there. I walked away with a reality check, and having seen prototypes of sustainable flight technologies, some hope that I might fly in an eco-friendly aircraft in my lifetime!
What is sustainable aviation anyway?
Just like sustainable travel reduces the negative impact of travel, and sustainable fashion reduces the negative impact of fashion, sustainable aviation refers to reducing the negative impact of flying.
We are in the midst of breaching a global temperature rise of 1.5°C due to high and rising global carbon emissions. The impact of climate change is visible all around us, in the form of increased and more severe heatwaves, droughts, flooding and other extreme weather events.
The primary ask of sustainable aviation is to decarbonize the aviation sector – aka reduce its carbon footprint. This includes reducing the GHG emissions produced from commercial and non-commercial flights, but also from all the infrastructure supporting it, like airports and ground handling.
But sustainable aviation doesn’t end there. It also means reducing the other environmental impacts of flying, including its plastic and food footprint.
The global aviation sector has committed to a goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 – but realistically speaking, we are very far from achieving that goal, atleast now in 2025.
The environmental impact of flying
The carbon footprint of flying can be split into three categories:
Carbon emissions from traditional jet fuels: When fuel is burnt during take-off, flying and landing, it releases greenhouse gas emissions, which account for the majority of flying’s carbon footprint.
Contrail emissions: Besides greenhouse gases, aircrafts also emit water vapor. When outdoor conditions are cold and humid, the vapour freezes to make condensation trails (contrails), which trap the sun’s radiation and increase warming. They remain in the atmosphere only for six hours but cause a similar range of warming as CO2 – which means they are way more potent. Contrail emissions are still not well understood, and therefore not yet being measured.
Infrastructure emissions: This includes everything that supports the aviation sector: airports, extraction of raw materials to build planes, plane building facilities, ground transport, fuel transportation, disposal of the aircraft at the end of life etc.
Aviation currently contributes to 2.5% of global carbon emissions, excluding contrail emissions. This share has remained pretty constant over the years as absolute global emissions have grown, indicating that absolute aviation emissions have grown too.